Editorials
How ‘The Persistence’ Uses Procedural Generation To Keep Its Horror Fresh
It’s a reasonable assumption to make that even some of the best horror films lose a little of their luster after the third or fourth viewing. Don’t get me wrong, the classics are just that – classics, but nothing can replicate the chills, the unsettling first-time frights or the rush of adrenaline that you get when experiencing those movies for the very first time.
As much as their silver-screen counterparts, horror efforts in the gaming realm can also too, find themselves similarly afflicted in this way, with the numerous jump scares and gore stuffed cut-cutscenes ascribing to the law of diminishing returns with every subsequent viewing. After all, there are only so many times you can take the head of the Baker family crashing through the walls at you in Resident Evil 7 before you kinda get a little numb to it all.
For me that’s quite a lot – for others, however, your mileage may vary.
Enter then The Persistence, a sterling first-person shooter effort for PSVR from British developer Firesprite, the game aims to disrupt the status quo a bit more than its contemporaries seem willing to. As the clone of a security officer on a ship that finds itself generously stuffed with a number of Event Horizon 2.0 style aberrations to avoid, the emphasis in The Persistence is very much on stealth and by proxy, not getting pounded into a fine red mist by said monstrosities.
Where The Persistence meaningfully differs itself from its genre peers, however, is in how it leverages procedural generation to keep its level layouts fresh. Every time you start a new playthrough, the ship’s structure rearranges its numerous deck modules into a random configuration which in turn has a direct impact on how to approach each attempt at the game.
Open plan areas in a previous playthrough that may have permitted wide creative latitude for concealment might well find themselves replaced by tighter affairs, where such opportunities for stealth are limited. Likewise, the numerous monsters that you’ll encounter throughout the ship also find themselves similarly shuffled around the place too – where there could have been a trivial foe on a previous playthrough, might now be supplanted by an indomitable enemy that completely changes your tactics and approach to the situation at hand.
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By embracing such mercurial design principles, The Persistence keeps not just the challenge fresh but the fear and the horror unfaded too – a miracle of sorts that more developers in this genre space should take notice of going forward. In The Persistence, every corner potentially holds some fresh terror, while the comforts of previously discovered safe areas to retreat to no longer exist.
With each playthrough the terror is reimagined anew and so too with it does that familiar fraying of the nerves and the pumping of adrenaline emerge start once again. Exacerbating the effect further is the fact that The Persistence is played out entirely within the realms of VR, meaning that each and every fright and pointedly, the anticipation of them, is far more keenly affecting than your underwear might like them to be.
In essence, procedural generation would seem to be a robust and evocative way to ensure that games which trade on horror, terror and fearful thrills can continue to do so for far longer than they would be otherwise able to. Tantalizingly, if one were to expand the concept beyond the boundaries of The Persistence, an already superbly judged hybrid of Dead Space and Alien Isolation, the mind boggles at how other entries in the genre might well benefit from the inclusion of such design.
Certainly, a version of the previously mentioned Alien Isolation which might include procedurally generated content would be a grandly pant-filling affair – albeit one that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense when viewed within that game’s rigid narrative framework. Equally though, a Resident Evil title in the style of Resident Evil 7 with shifting map layouts and randomized enemy design could also succeed as well.
Like that force thing from Star Wars, however, there must be balance. While procedural generation is great at randomizing level design, monster types, locations and so on, overdoing it can result in a deeply impersonal experience. Worse still, this results in the realization that the game isn’t properly catering for the player or their feelings, which when you’re dealing with notions of horror and terror that literally feed off your own personal experience, is really quite the opposite of what you want as a player and a narrative participant.
In The Persistence, however, this is the never the case simply because its procedural design beats operate within a very well defined set of deftly considered parameters, ensuring that the constant sense of unease and the spectacle of its unrelenting terror are never diminished.
So yeah, more of this please developers.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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